


reading between the lines

by acollectionofdaydreams



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Because fuck canon, Canon Compliant, Julia Confronting Q, Season 4 Episode 5, season 4, someone finally talks to q about eliot, talking about feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-14
Updated: 2019-08-14
Packaged: 2020-08-23 06:33:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20238328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acollectionofdaydreams/pseuds/acollectionofdaydreams
Summary: Julia finds Q and has a conversation with him about why he's so determined to save Eliot after the events of 4x05.





	reading between the lines

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this fic entirely out of spite because the writers never had anyone on the whole damn show acknowledge Q & Eliot's romantic relationship the way they did all the het couples in s4. This is hardly the first fic of its kind in the fandom but I needed to write it anyway to channel my own rage. Might or might not become a series with other characters having similar conversations with Q in their own ways.

Quentin was out on the balcony that night when Julia found him. He had a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth, but he was only half heartedly smoking it. It looked more like a self-soothing mechanism than anything else. She’d seen him smoking a lot more since Eliot got possessed. She supposed she didn’t really have any moral high ground to stand on since she’d picked the habit back up herself, but it did make her worry for him. It was another in an increasingly long list of signs that he wasn’t taking care of himself at all.

She knew her best friend, though, so she didn’t confront him about it. Instead, she slid the door closed and plopped herself down in the seat next to him, reaching out her hand for a cigarette. He passed one to her wordlessly and held his lighter out for her. She took a long drag before letting her hand fall back down across the arm of the patio chair and staring out into the city before them. It was late enough for the street lights to be on but early enough for there to still be people milling about on the sidewalk below. The dull sounds of people and traffic blended together into a mildly pleasant static.

“What a day,” she said.

“Yeah,” Quentin agreed.

Julia eyed him for a moment. His dark circles were prominent under his eyes, and he looked exhausted in the way that sleep just wasn’t going to fix. There was something else though. Something new. Since they’d left the park that afternoon, he’d been practically buzzing with it. She wouldn’t call it excitement, and maybe hope was too optimistic as well, but there was something there in his eyes that she hadn’t seen in a long while now. That was why she’d gone looking for him in the first place.

“So, about what happened earlier,” she started.

He turned to her with a pleading look, and she felt a twinge of sympathy for him. He definitely didn’t want to talk about it with her, but she thought she needed him to. If she was going to stand beside him on this reckless mission to save Eliot at potentially the cost of everything and everyone else, she had to know why he was so sure.

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” she continued, “but I need something to go on here, Q. How sure are you that it was really Eliot and not another one of the monster’s games?”

“Sure enough to bet my life on it,” he said.

“Sure enough to bet everyone else's too?” she pushed.

He looked down at his hands, and she could see his jaw clenching as he thought over how to respond.

“It was him, Jules,” he said quietly, “and I can’t just _abandon_ him if he’s alive in there.”

She pushed her hair back behind her ear as she twisted in her chair to face him. 

“I get that,” she said, “but Q--”

She jumped a bit when Quentin turned to her, his eyes suddenly alive with that new unnamable emotion.

“The things he said were things only Eliot would know,” he insisted.

Julia wanted to believe him so badly. She really did. It was just that she’d seen what the monster was capable of. Quentin treated him like he was some eccentric child they were babysitting, but Julia was honestly terrified of him. He could snap their necks in a heartbeat if he got bored of them. She just couldn’t trust the way Quentin could when it came to this thing.

She asked, “Is it not possible that he dug through Eliot’s memories, though?”

Quentin sighed as if she were being dense about this. She’d prickle a bit more about his condescension under any other circumstance, but she was really trying to understand here.

“No,” Quentin said. “Not with that.”

She sensed she was hitting a brick wall with that line of questioning, so she decided it was time to switch angles before he shut her out entirely.

“What did he say then?” she pushed gently. “I heard something about fifty years and proof of concept?”

She’d honestly thought the monster was just spouting nonsense, but it clearly meant something to Quentin.

“Do we really have to do this now?” he asked.

He was giving her that pleading look again. The one that begged her to leave well enough alone because this was too sensitive, too much for him right now. She knew that look well. It was one she’d usually given in to when they were younger and Quentin was having a particularly bad mental health episode. She’d just curl up next to him instead and hope her presence was enough to offer some comfort where her words couldn’t. She felt really bad that she couldn’t just do that this time. 

“I think we do,” she replied.

There was a beat of silence before Quentin slumped back into his chair and sighed. She could practically see the moment his wall came down and he gave in.

“He was referencing a conversation we had during the key quest,” he explained. 

She watched him silently. She knew him well, and once the dam broke, he would usually let it all come spilling out. So she waited him out and was rewarded when he pushed onward.

“I don’t know how much you knew about the quest we did for the time key?” he asked.

“Not much,” she admitted. She’d been so caught up in her goddess stuff that she’d missed a fair bit of the details of the quest itself. She asked, “Was that the key you and Eliot went to Fillory in the past and completed the mosaic to get?”

“Yeah,” he confirmed, “except it wasn’t that simple. We worked on that puzzle every single day for fifty years before I finally figured it out.”

“Wait, what?” she asked. She’d clearly been more distracted than she’d realized if she’d somehow missed this much. “Fifty years? I don’t understand.”

There was a ghost of a smile on Quentin’s face, despite everything, and _oh_, she’d definitely missed something here.

“The answer to the puzzle was the beauty of all life,” Quentin explained. “It wasn’t a sunrise or a Fibonacci sequence or any of the other bullshit we tried to make. It was the act of living itself.”

“So,” she said, trying to get him to spell it out, though she was starting to get an idea. “It was a literal demonstration of the beauty of all life itself?”

“Right,” he agreed. “In those fifty years, a lot happened, Jules. I fell in love, got married, raised a son, grew old. It wasn’t until Eliot died though and I was burying him that the final piece of the mosaic revealed itself.”

Julia was trying to follow and honestly finding it hard to even know where to begin with all of the information she’d just been given. There was a sense of awe in her voice when she said, “So, you lived a whole life with Eliot, and the puzzle deemed it beautiful.”

“I guess so,” he shrugged.

Because she was his best friend and contractually obligated to not let things like this go, she had to ask.

“And am I correct in assuming that you and Eliot weren’t just best bros in this life?” she pushed, trying to hide the smirk she knew was edging its way onto her face.

Quentin huffed out a laugh, and she mentally high fived herself because she was definitely onto something.

“Yeah, that’d be correct,” he said sheepishly.

“So,” she said, biting back the smile that still definitely found its way into her voice, “you and Eliot fell in love and grew old together and then what? You just came back here like nothing ever happened?”

Quentin’s good mood soured a little bit, and yeah, she’d figured that one out too. Quentin wasn’t the type to fall in love with someone and just walk away like that. He’d fallen helplessly head over heels with every crush he’d ever had because that’s just who he was. He either loved with everything he had or there was no point to it at all. So if he wasn’t with Eliot now, something had gone horribly wrong.

“I asked him to do it all again with me when we got back,” he said. “I told him we’d lived fifty years together, and who gets proof of concept like that? If anyone had a good enough reason to give it a shot, it had to be us.”

Proof of concept. Fifty years. It was all falling swiftly into place in Julia’s mind.

“Except he didn’t see it that way,” Quentin continued. “He said that wasn’t really us. He said he wouldn't choose me, not if he had a choice.”

If Eliot wasn’t currently possessed and in life threatening danger every second of every day, Julia would have acted on her sudden urge to slap the living daylights out of him. Hell, she still might have if she wasn’t afraid that the monster would kill her immediately after. She knew he could be cruel, but she hadn’t imagined him capable of hurting Quentin like this. She forced herself to quell the protective best friend anger though and focus because they weren’t at the end of this story yet.

“So, what he said in the park earlier,” she said. “It was referencing that conversation?”

“Yep,” Quentin agreed.

“What do you think he meant?” she asked.

Quentin sighed.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, “but I know the monster wouldn’t understand. Even if he saw Eliot’s memory of that conversation, he wouldn’t get why it was important. That’s why I know it was really him.”

“Okay,” Julia said, nodding her head. “Okay, Q, I believe you.”

The look he gave her was washed over in relief and gratitude. She knew they’d only scratched the surface of what was really going on here, but she’d gotten enough of the puzzle to complete it for herself. It explained Quentin’s recklessness, his determination, and the way he so willingly played along with whatever whims the monster dragged him along for. It explained the way Quentin couldn’t even look the monster in the eyes yet he helped it kill literal gods. It wasn’t because he wasn’t scared of the monster like she was. It was because it was Eliot, and he was in love with Eliot. When Quentin loved someone, he’d burn down the whole world to protect them. Any thought she’d ever had about Quentin seeing that maybe it wasn’t worth it died in that moment. He wouldn’t stop, ever, if he thought there was even a chance. 

“Thank you for telling me,” she said.

He nodded as he looked back down at his hands. She reached out to brush his hair out of his eyes where it had fallen. It was getting longer since Brian had cut it, and his bangs were in his face more often than not. It made him look like the little kid she’d once known him to be. When he looked up at her, she gave him a soft smile.

“We’ll do our best to save him,” she promised.

“Thank you,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think! I'm on tumblr at eliotapologist now.


End file.
